Latvian nouns have seven grammatical cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative.
A small subclass of 2nd declension nouns have identical nominative and genitive singular (most of them ending in -ens).
These are part of the so-called consonant stem nouns: e.g. akmens "stone", asmens "blade", mēness "moon", rudens "autumn", sāls "salt", ūdens "water", and zibens "lightning".
The 4th and 5th declensions include a number of masculine nouns (e.g. puika "boy", or proper names such as Dilba, Zvaigzne), or common gender nouns that are either masculine or feminine depending on their use in context (e.g. paziņa "acquaintance", bende "executioner").
[3] In English Academia the term "iotation" is often used to refer to properties of Eastern Slavic vowels wherein they acquire an underlying /j/ which palatalizes the preceding consonants regardless of their position within a word which is similar to the phenomenon of assimilative palatalization of consonants in Lithuanian.
After the Soviet occupation of Latvia minor reforms were made to Latvian orthography, namely the use of long ⟨ō⟩, the ⟨ch⟩ digraph and the use of "softened" ⟨ŗ⟩ were abolished.
Proponents of ⟨ŗ⟩ point out that it aids in distinguishing a number of homographic heterophones and helps distinguishing the so-called "open ⟨e⟩" (/æ/) and "close ‹e›" (/e/) and prevents the appearance of their alternations in nominal paradigm (referred to as umlaut (pārskaņa), metaphony (metafonija) and other names such as regresīvā vokāļu harmonizācija, etc.)
"bay horse" (assuming the latter is not subjected to umlaut), however, the more common occurrence of the words "I poured (a granular substance)" and "of funeral" becoming perfect homophones is likely to be seen as a net-loss by proponents of ‹ŗ›.
In Latvian literature it is usually assumed that open /æ/ is the underlying value of e which became the more close /e/ when followed by a palatal element - either a front vowel /i, e, iɛ, ei/ (cf.
German Gast : Gäste /gast : ɡɛstə/) or the palatal approximant /j/ (the "shifted" values can always be analyzed as sums of some consonant and *j in historical terms: š < *tj, ž < *dj, etc.)
In fact, consonant shift can be viewed as a means of blocking umlaut alternations in nominal paradigm, e.g., the 5th declension in -e has front vocalic endings (-e, -es, -ei, -ēm, etc.)
Some suggest[3] that the abolition of Endzelīns' orthography in 1946 and 1957 was motivated by the fact that after the occupation Soviet authorities were promoting Russian-born Latvians for positions in the new administration, who, in turn, were not familiar with the developments that had taken place during the decades of independence.
A 2000 handbook on Latvian orthography lists the following words as exceptions to consonant shift due to reasons of euphony.
2nd declension two-syllable male names with stems ending in ‹d,t› never undergo consonant shift (Uldis, Artis, Gatis, and so forth.)
Besides body parts (acs, auss) there is a number of other words that historically do not undergo consonant shift, e.g., the name of the town of Cēsis.
Words with stem-final -st are not subject to consonant shift this includes all feminine forms of -ist nouns (e.g., feministe and so forth.)
Similar to the "hard and soft C" and "hard and soft G" distinction in many (mostly Western) European languages Latvian seeks to palatalize /k/ and /g/ when they are proceeded by front vowels (/e/ or /i/) to either: Unlike most Western European languages where the reader is expected to predict the "softness" or "hardness" of the ⟨c⟩ and ⟨g⟩ based on whether they are proceeded by a front vowel and the orthography doesn't change (e.g., cocoa /ˈkəʊ.kəʊ/ and Cecilia /seˈsilja/ both being written with ⟨c⟩), the highly phonetic orthography of Latvian requires any such changes to be shown in writing.
As is evident with the loan ģimene "family," from the Lithuanian language,[6] /c/ and /ɟ/ are over-represented in borrowed lexical items.
By comparing Lithuanian gimti (source of Lithuanian giminė and eventually Latvian ģimene) and Latvian dzimt ("to be born") it can be observed that replacing dorsal consonants with affricates (/k/ → /ts/, /ɡ/ → /dz/) before a front vowel is the more "native" way reserved for pre-front vowel dorsal consonant changes in native words as can be observed in Rīga → rīdzinieks, logs ("window") → palodze ("windowsill") or koks ("tree") → kociņš ("a stick.")
Some nouns do not belong to any of the declension classes presented above, and show no case or number inflection.
Latvian has no definite and indefinite articles, but the form of the adjective chosen can determine the correct interpretation of the noun phrase.
"I myself", "they themselves") is irregular: Other pronouns and determiners exhibit regular (indefinite) adjectival declension: In Latvian there are two types of numerals: cardinals and ordinals.
The ablative is generally not presented as a separate grammatical case in traditional Latvian grammars, because it appears exclusively with prepositions.
The ablative case emerged in Latvian under the circumstances of shifting the government of almost all prepositions in the plural to the dative form.
[citation needed] The old dual endings of all cases: The locative case once had three forms:[citation needed] inessive (the regular and most common form), illative (for example in old Latvian texts: iekš(k)an tan pirman vietan, in modern Latvian it has been replaced by the inessive, but vestiges of what once was an illative final -an changed to an -ā[citation needed] remain in some adverbs, e.g. āran > ārā 'outdoors, outside', priekšan > priekš 'for'), allative (only used in a few idiomatic expressions like: augšup, lejup, mājup, kalnup, šurp, turp).